Broken china, velvet, wax, and photographs: Julian Schnabel paints on anything, bringing to life a monumental, brutal, and cultured form of painting that hangs continuously between abstraction and figuration. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Schnabel burst onto the scene in 1980s New York, becoming a central figure in the era that marked the grand international return to painting. Over the years, he has forged a path that also encompasses filmmaking and other forms of expression.
Pietro Moretti, born in 1996, belongs to a generation and an imagery that appear light-years away. In his large-scale canvases, distinct phases of life become spaces suspended between fairy tale, theater, and reality. Moretti depicts people and places that seem to lose themselves in order to find themselves: woodlands, gatherings, and dark fairy tales become spaces of freedom, vulnerability, and resistance to authority.
Nearly three generations and two different approaches to painting separate Schnabel and Moretti. Yet, it is precisely within this distance that a common ground emerges. Both bring what they have experienced, remembered, and imagined into their work. Starting with what surrounds them—people, encounters, places, memories—they allow painting to transform these elements into something entirely different, a kind of personal mythology. It is on this shared ground that their dialogue takes shape at the Paggerie in Sassuolo, where a monumental work by Julian Schnabel is brought into relation with the more intimate and visionary works of Pietro Moretti. This dialogue between two generations and two deeply distinct painterly approaches explores how private experience, filtered through imagination and paint, can shed its boundaries and become universal.
The exhibition will also feature several publications illustrating Schnabel’s engagement with ceramics—the quintessential cultural and industrial asset of Sassuolo.
The exhibition is promoted by the Cultural Events Department of the Municipality of Sassuolo, co-financed by ANCI and the Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri – Dipartimento per le Politiche Giovanili e il Servizio Civile Universale, through the 2023 Youth Policy Fund.
